The Spell PDF EPUB Download

When Brooklyn, a witch, turns sixteen, her conservative parents finally unbind her powers, bringing her newfound popularity and the attention of her long-time crush, Asher, but using spells may endanger her and, unless she uses her special ability to magically match couples, she may lose Asher.

Few forces in the world are as potent as religion: it comforts people in their suffering and inspires them to both magnificent and terrible deeds. In this provocative and timely book, Daniel C. Dennett seeks to uncover the origins of religion and discusses how and why different faiths have shaped so many lives, whether religion is an addiction or a genuine human need, and even whether it is good for our health. Arguing passionately for the need to understand this multifaceted phenomenon, Breaking the Spell offers a truly original – and comprehensive – explanation for faith.

The hero of this American gothic nightmare comedy is a messianic hillbilly prophet whose onetime local glory as a high school football star gives way to a career of outlaw questing. With the mysterious disappearance of his main squeeze -- an edgy, spooky honkytonk chanteuse -- that quest becomes increasingly deviant and deranged. The landscape through which the earnest, confused seeker chivvies his banged-up black pickup truck is a magical and timeless one, its dense woods and dark lakes charged with a heavy burden of industrially-produced hexes, curses and toxic spells. Mechanical animals and changeling species, subjected to continual torments of re-programming, run half wild through a menacing backwater of poisonous tarns, vicious factories and slimy swamps. Elders of strange religions exercise insidious, unpleasant influences, while witches in Secret Shacks broadcast bad vibrations that produce genetic alterations. In this mutated vision of "reality" now, there is a general spell under which everybody is bound. The Spell: A Romance is a strange, haunting and funny poetic novel about the survival of medieval chivalric codes -- and their dangerous implications -- in a toxic-shocked modern world. It is also a tale of love and quest, betrayal and revenge. The mysterious protean voice of the book slips back and forth from comic narrative prose to spare lyrical poetry as it becomes the voice of legend: allusive, expansive, suspending disbelief.

Breaking the Spell offers the first full-length study that charts the historical trajectory of anarchist-inflected video activism from the late 1960s to the present. Video plays an increasingly important role among activists in the growing global resistance against neoliberal capitalism. As a result, alternative media production becomes a central location where new collective forms of subjectivity can be created to challenge aspects of neoliberalism. Chris Robé's book fills in historical gaps by bringing to light unexplored video activist groups like the Cascadia Forest Defenders, eco-video activists from Eugene, Oregon; Mobile Voices, Latino day laborers harnessing cell phone technology to combat racism and police harassment in Los Angeles; and Outta Your Backpack Media, indigenous youth from the Southwest who use video to celebrate their culture and fight against marginalization. This groundbreaking study also deepens our understanding of more well-researched movements like AIDS video activism, Paper Tiger Television, and Indymedia by situating them within a longer history and wider context of radical video activism.

The Spell is a comedy of sexual manners that follows the interlocking affairs of four men: Robin, an architect in his late forties, who is trying to build an idyllic life in Dorset with his younger lover, Justin; Robin's 22 year old son Danny, a volatile beauty who lives for clubbing and casual sex; and the shy Alex, who is Justin's ex-boyfriend. As each in turn falls under the spell of romance or drugs, country living or rough trade, a richly ironic picture emerges of the clashing imperatives of modern gay life. At once lyrical, sceptical and romantic, The Spell confirms Alan Hollinghurst as one of Britain's most important novelists. From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty.

In Egypt one ever seeks the dead in sunshine, black vaults in the land of the gold. But here in Abydos I was accompanied by whiteness. The general effect of Seti's mighty temple is that it is a white temple when seen in full sunshine and beneath a sky of blinding blue. In an arid place it stands, just beyond an Egyptian village that is a maze of dust... -from "Abydos" Leave it to a beloved novelist to bring to life the allure and mystery of Egypt. First published in 1908 under the title Egypt and Its Monuments, this is a beautifully poetic valentine to that desert land by Robert Hichens, one of the most popular fiction writers of the early 20th century. Romantic and transporting, this lovely book explores the "drowsily splendid" pyramids, the "terrible repose" of the Sphinx, the "silver eddies" of the Nile, the "immense aspect of patience" suggested by the Colossi of Memnon, the Tombs of the Kings, where a "king's silence bids you be silent," and more. Whether you've actually traveled down the Nile or have only dreamed about it, you will be swept away by Hichens' idyllic prose. British novelist ROBERT SMYTHE HICHENS (1864-1950) also wrote The Garden of Allah, The Lady Who Lied, and The Paradine Case.

Winner of the International Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction Animal tracks, word magic, the speech of stones, the power of letters, and the taste of the wind all figure prominently in this intellectual tour de force that returns us to our senses and to the sensuous terrain that sustains us. This major work of ecological philosophy startles the senses out of habitual ways of perception. For a thousand generations, human beings viewed themselves as part of the wider community of nature, and they carried on active relationships not only with other people with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including mountains, rivers, winds, and weather patters) that we have only lately come to think of as "inanimate." How, then, did humans come to sever their ancient reciprocity with the natural world? What will it take for us to recover a sustaining relation with the breathing earth? In The Spell of the Sensuous David Abram draws on sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and his own experience as an accomplished sleight-of-hand of magician to reveal the subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. He explores the character of perception and excavates the sensual foundations of language, which--even at its most abstract--echoes the calls and cries of the earth. On every page of this lyrical work, Abram weaves his arguments with a passion, a precision, and an intellectual daring that recall such writers as Loren Eisleley, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez.

This book investigates the nature of the alphabet as a medium of communication. The general thesis is that writing is not a merely transparent or empty item like air or glass; rather, the alphabet is both modifier and enabler of meaning itself: The book investigates the general implications of this thesis.